Monday, August 31st, 2009
I wish I could say I was the genius, but it was the internet that gave me this little bit of genius.
Have you ever thought about freezing your cookie dough? Me neither, until one of the wonderful baking websites I lurk on told me. I was absolutely in love with the idea.
And it only took me 2 months to do it!
To be fair, I really didn’t do any baking in the last few months, so opportunity was limited. But, for some reason, I made Peanut Butter Cinnamon Chocolate Chip cookies last night and Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal cookies tonight. I really don’t like peanut butter; I’m not that fond of bananas; and oatmeal is in the “leave it” column. But the combination of the three – yummy!! For both batches, I made a double batch and just baked several dozen. I used my Pampered Chef melon baller and made perfect cookies balls. For the ones I didn’t bake, I put them on some paper plates and stuck them into the freezer for several hours. Then, after they were all frozen, I popped them into an empty ice cream container. The only downfall to that storage method – I can see The Hubby some member of my family actually expecting ice cream to be in an ice cream container. I do have some in a freezer ziploc bag – so I will have to see which one works the best for us. Next week I will have to test how well the frozen balls bake and how the final product comes out. Life’s tough, huh?
Posted in Food | Comments Off on Genius
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
The Boy: ” Mom, these cookies are the best cookies ever. Either you need to make them all the time or never make them again!”.
From Gourmet Magazine’s Letters to the Editor in the Dec. 2008 edition.
Real Danish Butter Cookies
Makes about 9 dozen
Active Time: 1 hour Start to Finish: 1 ¼ hour
4 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 lb. unsalted butter at room temperature for 1 hour
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 large egg, beaten
3 to 4 tablespoon sanding or other coarse grain sugar
1) Preheat oven to 325 with racks in upper and lower thirds. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper
2) Whisk together flour and baking soda.
3) Beat butter with an electric mixer until fluffy (if using a stand mixer, use paddle attachment), then add sugar and flour mixture, mixing until just combined. Divide dough in half
4) Roll each piece of dough between large sheets of plastic wrap (about 1/8 inch thick). Chill on a tray until firm, about 30 minutes. Cut into 2 by 1.5 inch rectangles and arrange 1 inch apart on 2 large baking sheets. (If dough becomes too soft, chill or freeze until firm enough to handle.)
5) Brush tops of cookies lightly with beaten egg, then sprinkle with sanding sugar. Bake cookies, 2 sheets at a time, switching positions of pans halfway through baking, until cookies are very pale golden, about 15 minutes. Cool on sheets 5 minutes, then carefully slide cookies (on parchment) to racks to cool completely. Make more cookies with remaining dough, baking on cooled, freshly lined baking sheets. Reroll scraps once.
Dough can be made one day ahead, chilled. Cookies keep in airtight container at room temperature, 1 week.
My notes:
No point in preheating the oven until you actually are about to make the cookies.
I wasn’t happy with the rectangles I made, so I made the cookies smaller and used a flower-shaped cookie cutter.
I suggest dividing the dough into 4 sections, not half, when you roll it out between the plastic wrap. It was easier to deal with and easier to put in the fridge to chill.
I re-rolled the dough twice – no one complained (actually, they just wanted more!)
Posted in Food, The Boy | Comments Off on The Best Cookies Ever
Friday, December 19th, 2008
Torture: Physical Therapy. I have been to three physical therapy appointments so far (I expect to have about 12 all together). The first one was awesome… I was walking much better afterwards and felt better too. The second one had me walking better, but was a bit harder on my knee. Today’s appointment… well, it started off with a very stiff knee, which my therapist could see the second he watched me walk by him. I had about 10 minutes of one of the warmest heating pads I’ve ever had… and I loved every second of it. He massages my knee cap and then has me do some flexing and stretching of the muscles. Today he moved my leg to the left and to the right, stretching out the muscles on the sides of my knee. But the real torture was when he had me bend my knee as far as I could while I was lying on my back. He gave me a strap (tied around my ankle) to pull my knee up every minute or so. That was painful… stretching my knee like that. But, I did get it to bend almost like my right knee.
More Torture…
What probably made my knee stiff was all the baking I did yesterday. I am having a great time baking Christmas cookies, but all the standing does wear me out. A few days ago I made gingersnap cookies; over the last day or so I made Danish butter cookies. I loved the way the gingersnaps came out. I was a bit unhappy with the way the butter cookies were coming out, though. I couldn’t get the square size the way I wanted to have them. So I came up the brillant idea of using a cookie cutter. (Like no one else has ever used one, right?) So now I have dozens and dozens of beautiful, delicious butter cookies too.
I found some other reciepes I want to get to this weekend. Part of the baking is for Christmas presents; the other part is to stock up for our annual Holiday Halftime party. Plus, I just like baking. And I have my eye on some candies I want to get done too.
Posted in Food | Comments Off on Torture and More Torture
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Just like you, I have my favorite websites that I visit regularly. One of mine is Home Ec 101. It has tons of practical information, from some great gals in the blogosphere.
They accept questions on your basic (and not so basic) household issues. I finally worked up the nerve and submitted a question. I wanted to know what to do with the leftover grease from hamburg and other nasty oils. And they posted it up as a question here.
How kewl is that?
And now I know the best way to get rid of leftover grease!
Posted in Food | Comments Off on I’m Famous… almost (sort of)
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
… who hasn’t kept up with her blog posting. I can’t believe I haven’t written since Oct. 26th! It feels like forever, doesn’t it? Have you missed me?
I have been keeping busy, in mostly good ways. Of course there is always work and home life to keep me busy, but I feel like I have been extra busy to have ignored my writing for so long.
There was Halloween. The Hubby and I dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf and went to a party at K&E’s house. We had a good time – lots of friends were there. (I’d put pictures – but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment!)
I have been working on the church Annual Finance Campaign. This takes time – both in creating the materials and in following up with people about their giving for the upcoming year. Our commitment Sunday was a few weeks ago; now I update the spreadsheet with all the pledges given and track down everyone who gave last year and haven’t replied for this year.
I got a new computer. My Gateway was having several issues. It was getting pretty full and didn’t have alot of free space. (Yes – I did go through it and got rid of programs and files I didn’t need anymore). I regularly did the disk scan thing to clear up temp files and crap like that, and defragmented every week or so… but it really wasn’t helping much. I started to get error messages about data not being written to the hard drive. The final straw was the power issue. I would be at my desk, using my external keyboard – not even touching the actual laptop – and the power would flicker between the AC adapter and the internal battery. I had a friend take a look at it, and he recommended to my bosses that I get a new computer. Considering the Gateway was 2.5 years old, it had certainly done its’ work for me as well as could be expected.
So, I ended up with a Lenovo Y530 from Circuit City (before they announced store closings!). I spent a day and a half geting used to Vista; installing, uninstalling, reinstalling software; finding those “only use them once in a while” programs are actually programs I need at my fingertips and then spending more time trying to find them again (auto-backup system, pdf printer, .mdi file converter, payroll company software, etc.) I only have one outstanding issue left, and I actually had the problem before I stopped using the Gateway.
For some reason, my external keyboard has stopped working. I “rebooted” it; I put in new batteries (twice!); I checked the software and it says it is working fine (I guess computers can lie!). The mouse works – but the keyboard doesn’t. So I still have that issue to resolve.
And tonight I got to make some cookies. It feels great to be in the kitchen trying a new recipe. I made Macadamia Lace Oatmeal cookies from Baking Bites. I had to make a change – I didn’t have any macadamia nuts. Well, that’s not exactly true. My sister in law gave me a bag – about 7 years ago – that I still had. I opened it – nibbled on it – and decided that was not going to go anywhere but the garbage. So I substituted walnuts instead. The verdict – very good! They are very simple to make – hardly any ingredients – and they are even wheat free so I can give them to my mom! The Hubby liked them alot – although I need to learn how to drizzle chocolate effectively to add a bit of pizazz to them. The Boy wasn’t interested when I was making them, but after tasting a finished one, said they were okay. I liked them – but you have to remember these are lace cookies, so they are not filling – they are very light.
Posted in Food | Comments Off on I’ve Been a Very Bad Person
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
I’ve seen that several times on various blogs… Nobody Cares What You Ate for Lunch. It’s meant to be a rallying cry to inject your website/blog with something useful for your readers, therefore ensuring you will have traffic, therefore ensuring you can earn money with advertising.
But I would argue, somebody does care what I ate for lunch (besides me, I mean.) It used to be, as a kid, I never ate much, so my mom would love to hear that I ate something (anything!) for lunch. My hubby would probably like to know I take time during the day to eat lunch… so I’m not starving or a cranky wife when he gets home. Maybe someone out there wants to know they are not the only ones to eat a piece of banana bread, a cup of hot chocolate and a cup of soup for lunch. Maybe I’ll share my secret recipe for fried rice… or talk about the awesomeness of the Quizno’s sandwich I had.
My blog is not about making money. If it was, I’d be writing every day, changing my layout and including advertising, promoting myself on other blogs, joining blogging communities, etc. And some day I may do that. But my audience may still hear about what I had for lunch!
Posted in Food | Comments Off on Nobody Cares What You Ate for Lunch
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
So, last week I went out and bought a Food Saver. We actually had have one in the basement that we never really used. It was white and got dirty easily; it seemed really loud so I didn’t like using it.
But with this new baking kick I’ve been on, plus the fact we are trying to eat/shop more responsibly, made me start thinking about bringing it back upstairs. Then I got a flyer from Costco with some coupons in it. There was one for $30 off a Food Saver plus $5 off a box of bags. Last time The Hubby and I were in Costco, he actually pointed out the Food Saver and noticed how different (a.k.a. better) it looked than the little white one we had. It was about $150 and I didn’t want to spend the money at that point. So, with this coupon, it would be down to $120 or so.
I got a free pass to BJ’s Club, so I went down to check out their prices and get some supplies for the church fundraiser. When I was getting my pass, they talked me into a membership. Since I still had 2 months on my Costco membership, they upped the membership from a special of 14 months to 16 months! The membership fee was $45 – which is about $10 cheaper than Costco. Plus, BJ’s is alot closer than Costco for us.
I looked at BJ’s Food Saver. It looked a little less sturdy – not quite as heavy duty. It was $130, so I went back up to Costco and picked up the “better” one for $120, plus got a box of bags with the $5 discount.
It took a few days to find time to get it out of the box and play around with it. It’s still loud, but it has a LOT more buttons and settings to work with. It has a light up dial that tells you the progress of the vacuum and when it starts to seal. You can use special containers (which we bought with the last one and we still have) with a hose attachment. You can use a DRY or MOIST food selection; a PULSE selection to manually vacuum to your own idea of “just right”. It has a roll dispenser inside the unit, with a slide cutter to cut the bags evenly and easily (very nice!).
So, last night I made spaghetti sauce with meatballs for dinner. After we were done, I put the leftovers in some tupperware and put it in the freezer overnight. Before dinner tonight, I popped them out of the containers (5 of them!), made bags, put each one in a bag, and vacuumed it up. Now I have 5 bags of sauce and meatballs, in 1 or 2 person quantities, that can go into a pot and boiled, ready to be eaten in 20 minutes or so. I went through the freezer and bagged up stuff that was in regular ziploc bags; then I went through the fridge and cleaned that out. I threw away stuff that had met its’ end and bagged up some other stuff. I bagged up some hot dogs, used the Pulse feature to bag up a head of lettuce (first I peeled off the lettuce leafs so it wasn’t a head shape, but actual lettuce leafs laying down. I used one of the containers for The Boy’s leftover taco stuff.
Now my fridge is clean(er), my freezer is better stocked and I’ve actually used an appliance on my counter top.
Posted in Family Life, Food | Comments Off on Food Saver
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Ah, lurking… you are probably doing it right now, aren’t you? You surf, you read, you check on your favorite sites… check out the links and blogrolls on a particular site.
It’s almost like the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
I found a site for food – Cheap Healthy Good – that I really liked. I read it often, and then started to check out sites they highlighted on the Tuesday Megalinks. That’s how I found several sites I now have bookmarked – Prudence Pennywise, Baking Bites and A Year of Crockpotting.
And from there I found other sites – Smoky Mountain Cafe and Bake or Break – that got bookmarked as well.
Links truly make the world wide web go round.
Posted in Food | Comments Off on where do you lurk?
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
Well, our regularly scheduled movie night was a bit of a bust. K&E were off to New Hampshire for the weekend, J&S couldn’t come (J was not feeling well and S had a conflict) and S wasn’t available either.
So I had all these great plans for homemade soup and bread (plus cookies) and no crowd to share it with.
Until…
My friend Sally emailed me Friday morning about the “Kitten of Death” my mom gave her. Apparently, Bolt (sounds like a soap opera hero’s name, right?) is quite the mouser and is keeping up the good family name in that area. So we were emailing back and forth and it ended up that I invited her, her husband and her son over for movie night.
Timing worked out perfect – The Boy had karate in the afternoon, so I was home by 5:30 to start the soup. I’d already made the bread earlier in the afternoon.
The Menu:
Rosemary Bread – made with fresh rosemary from my box garden
Pea, Lentil, Barley soup (Bob’s Red Mill mix – Ocean State $3) with beef
Cinnamon, Chocolate Peanut Butter cookies
The Movie:
Vantage Point
I told everyone this was an experimental dinner and the only thing I could vouch for was the cookies (I made those Thursday night and 1/3 of them were gone before we went to bed that night). Everyone thought the soup was good – but I think The Boy was less than thrilled (but didn’t want to say anything). The Hubby preferred the French bread I made last week over the Rosemary bread, but said it was a personal preference, not a reflection on how the bread turned out. I was hoping it’d would have been a bit better with the olive oil and fresh roasted garlic, but it was just ok – not spectacular like I had hoped.
The movie was pretty good – although I had an idea who the bad guy was when I first saw him onscreen. It used an interesting way to tell the story. It showed about 30 minutes of the story, then stopped, backtracked and showed the same 30 minutes, but this time from someone else’s point of view (hence the title VANTAGE POINT). It would than go through the same 30 minutes, stop, backtrack and then go through it again from someone else’s view. Each time, you would see more of the puzzle, see why some things were important or part of a larger plan. The basic story line was the US President was in Spain for a conference and there is an assassination attempt carried out.
After the movie we turned the TV on and CNN was on. We started talking about Sarah Palin, and the conversation drifted to Saturday Night Live’s skits with Tina Fey. So we cranked up the computer, hooked it up to the tv (The Hubby is great with that kind of stuff!) and watched some clips of Sarah Palin and the SNL skits. Gordon & Sally hadn’t seen the SNL stuff – just heard about it – so they were happy to have seen it in context. Tina Fey is just so dead on with her looks and voice for this character – if McCain/Palin wins, I think Lorne Micheals is going to have to shell out some big bucks to get Tina to come back!
Anyhow… blogging may be VERY light next week. I have a big church fundraiser I am in charge of, and tomorrow starts my busy week before the event. Everybody play nice while I’m away!
Posted in Food, TV/Movie | Comments Off on Movie Night update
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
Guess what we had for dinner tonight? Yup, chicken parm and french bread. And guess who made it? Yup, yours truly, amazingly enough.
The Hubby was gone all week – business trip – and was forced to eat restaurant food all week. Dinners here at home were simple: tacos for The Boy all week (he was so happy!) and whatever I felt like for myself. So I felt like I should do some cooking.
Of course, I didn’t get too carried away. I mean, I made the French bread from scratch, sure, but the chicken parm was practically no work at all. I found a great website, A Year of Crockpotting, for the chicken recipe. She said I could use frozen chicken, and that’s what I had. Unfortunately, it was a massive bunch of frozen chicken, so dipping in egg wash and then bread crumbs was less than 100% successful. I did the best I could, and it turned out alright. Some of the chicken was a bit dry, but that could have been from using the “quick” 3 to 4 hour method on high as opposed to the preferred 6 to 8 hours on low.
I turned to Home Ec 101 for the bread recipe. Heather posted a recipe for hoagie rolls, and there was a link for a french bread recipe. So I pulled it up and made 2 loafs – BY HAND – of wonderful, warm, delicious french bread for my honey bunny.
While I was making it, I searched for a recipe for rosemary bread. And I found what looks to be a keeper. I don’t know if I have ever mentioned it, but this summer I purchased some herbs and grew them out in a planter on the deck. And one of those herbs was a rosemary plant. I’ve used some of it, but not as much as I thought I would. So this will be a great way to use some of it up.
I was thinking of making soup and bread for our movie night on Friday. It’s our turn to host. So I have to come up with a dinner plan (well, I kind of already decided, now I just have to figure out what kind of soup!) and we have to narrow down a movie choice. It’s hard to decide between something we’ve seen and like or something we haven’t seen. We do have Vantage Point to watch, but we are thinking about some older movies that we like. I guess we will make a final decision about two minutes before we watch!
Posted in Food, The Hubby, TV/Movie | Comments Off on Chicken Parm and French Bread